Conformational and electrostatic properties of V‐G‐G‐V‐G, a typical sequence of the glycine‐rich regions of elastin An ab initio quantum molecular study

Abstract
The conformational analysis and electrostatic properties of the monomeric sequence V-G-G-V-G of the glycine-rich regions of elastin is presented with the aim of explaining NMR and CD experimental results. On the basis of the molecular model NH+3-V-G-G-V-G-COO, Gaussian 92 quantum-molecular computations were performed by using principally an ab initio method at the 3-21G level and AM1. The occurrence of local secondary structures and of beta I, beta II, beta II' and VIa turns is discussed. Our results clearly demonstrate that the transconformations beta I-->half turn (which was invoked to explain experimental results) and beta I-->beta II' are theoretically allowed.